Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 30, 2014

Many startups now go through accelerators and have mentors passing through each day with advice – usually it’s conflicting. There are bootcamps, startup classes, video interviews – the sources are now endless. Because I’ve asked more than 100 VCs similar questions I start to notice patterns in thinking.

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Startup Framework CTO Coach Sales 407

SoCal CTO

MARCH 9, 2010

In my post, Technology Roles in Startups , I described some of the different ways I engage with startup companies such as CTO Founder , CTO , Part-Time CTO , Acting CTO , Consultant, Advisor and Advisory Board Member. Now, most often technical advisors are part of a broader advisory board.

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CTO Coach Technical Review Technology CTO Hire 150

SoCal CTO

MARCH 12, 2012

I've recently received several emails from people looking for a technical cofounder for their startup. Make sure you go through the 32 Questions Developers May Have Forgot to Ask a Startup Founder. Of course, you will want to figure out a bit more about the specifics of what this developer needs to know vs. can learn.

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CTO Hire CTO Coach Startup Equity 211

SoCal CTO

MAY 21, 2013

I''m spending more of my time recently working with non-technical startup founders who are having challenges with their software/web/mobile development teams. These are often the same things that cause a founder to reach out to me about helping their CTO, VP Engineering, tech team, off-shore development, etc. Is there a lot of rework?

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CTO Coach Develop Development Startup 219

SoCal CTO

APRIL 2, 2012

You may end up hiring these people eventually and you'll know more about them when you do. When I talk with early-stage companies, often the discussion starts with them asking me about Hiring a CTO for Your Startup , or Finding a Technical Cofounder for Your Startup or How to Find Programmers for Your Startup.

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CTO Hire Outsource Development CTO Coach Develop 205

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 18, 2011

I received an inquiry from a reader of my blog and thought I would provide some thoughts, but would definitely welcome input: I am an unpaid CTO of a small startup. Of course, that doesn’t help here. Find a lawyer and someone who does CTO searches for VC backed companies in your area. Don’t put yourself in this situation.

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CTO CTO Hire CTO Coach Equity 167

SoCal CTO

APRIL 28, 2014

So I promised that I would provide a follow-up after the session. This is that follow-up and hopefully it’s useful to people outside of the session as well. Challenges I started by asking the founders in the room to tell me some of the challenges they have working with developers. Have they considered everything?

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Develop Development CTO Coach CTO Hire 280

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 18, 2011

I received an inquiry from a reader of my blog and thought I would provide some thoughts, but would definitely welcome input: I am an unpaid CTO of a small startup. Of course, that doesn’t help here. Find a lawyer and someone who does CTO searches for VC backed companies in your area. Don’t put yourself in this situation.

CTO 150

CTO CTO Hire CTO Coach Equity 150

socalTECH

JUNE 1, 2012

That's what Los Angeles-based MergeLocal (www.mergelocal.com) is looking to find out, by offering up points which can be converted to real cash, when users check into local businesses. What's your background, and how did you decide to start the company? Michael Wong: I was previously CTO of an agency called Breakthrough Ads.

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CTO Coach Startup Mobile Artificial Inteligence 223

SoCal CTO

MARCH 2, 2015

As the organizer of the LA CTO Forum , I get lots of inquiries by job seekers and people looking for CTO / VP Engineering talent. I’ve written quite a bit about aspects of this topic, especially from the perspective of startup founders looking for talent – you can find these in: Startup CTO.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

He had an idea for a startup that would help consumers better book service jobs and would take on Service Magic, which he believed had a business model that could be disrupted. I acted as the occasional mentor, advisor and coach to Ethan. In the same year they won Business Insider’s Startup competition.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

This is part of my Startup Advice series. Good entrepreneurs can admit when their course of action was wrong and learn from it. So I was surprised at the sheer volumes of decisions that had to be made when I became a startup CEO. Somebody asks whether you plan to set up 401k’s and do contribution matching.

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Entrepreneur Technical Review Slides CTO Coach 414

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 23, 2014

I will soon announce a few fundings (not yet closed, sorry) and I’m beginning to help them think about how to ramp up their engineering teams. And I spoke with the CTO of another great company I used to be on the board of and enlisted his support in potentially being an advisor to one company. Fred Wilson. Greg Bettinelli.

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Networking Startup CTO Coach Email 366

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 5, 2010

Great content again in September that meets at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. Chris Dixon , September 12, 2010 My most useful career experience was about eight years ago when I was trying to break into the world of VC-backed startups. Why You Should Write. Status / reputation.

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Startup Product Technology Venture Capital 191

SoCal CTO

APRIL 2, 2013

What's Going to Go Wrong A lot of founders don't really understand Lean Startup principles. They look at the following high level definition of Lean: and they interpret that as write up an executive summary with your ideas and hand it to developers to build. Do you have a Technical Advisors: Every Web/Mobile Startup Must Have One ?

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CTO Coach Metrics Framework Software Development 219

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

Startups are hard. You join teams that got good write-ups on TechCrunch, have great VCs, have star CEO’s, whatever. We tell startup stories. Our founder, Yves Sisteron, was my mentor and board member at my first startup. You’ve heard that a million times. Those that we survive with become family.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Startup CTO Coach Venture Capital 320

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 20, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, February 20, 2007 Innovation and Geography I ran across a post in Read/Write Web - Does Location Matter in Web Innovation? Ive personally been involved in the start-up world in Los Angeles for about 15 years, and have had the opportunity to work on many early-stage companies (e.g.,

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CTO Coach Southern California CTO Hire Social Media 150

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

By far the most popular post on this blog is 32 Questions Developers May Have Forgot to Ask a Startup Founder. While I’ve updated it a few times, it continues to get at important questions that startup founders need to be asking. Of course, response time is quite a bit more complex than this. What do they do? Is SEO important?

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Startup SEO CTO Coach Web 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

Fred Wilson also wrote on a similar topic in his usual more succinct manner , with a great quote being: “One thing I know for sure is that those who advise and invest in startups cannot and should not meddle in the day to day decision making. It’s harmful and hurtful to the startup and those that lead it. ” PR.

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Startup Sales CTO Coach Course 150

Tech Zulu Event

JUNE 20, 2013

As the NBA playoffs closes to an end in a grueling road to Game 7 between Miami Heats and San Antonio Spurs, it would behoove every startup founder to learn from key elements and strategies of both teams, as lessons from the sport of basketball can directly translate to the success of a startup company. 1) Identifying Team Chemistry.

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Startup CTO Coach Coach Study 94

Tech Zulu Event

JULY 26, 2012

A new startup from as far as Berlin, loui AppsUG is making Facebook more interesting and personalized to as real as following status updates relating to one’s mood and preferences. The startup, loui Apps was founded in Berlin late last year. TechZulu caught up with Stefanie Hoffmann co-founder Ioui Apps. Of course not.

Social Network 89

Social Network Startup CTO Coach Social Media 89

Tech Zulu Event

AUGUST 31, 2011

Coming hot off the coat tail of earlier this year’s Startup Weekend LA where Zaarly launched, this LASW was nothing less than amazing and as someone put, one of the best tech events in LA they had ever been to.

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Los Angeles Startup Angel Tech Coast Angels 73

Tech Zulu Event

JUNE 16, 2014

We recently sat down with Luc Berlin, co-founder of Miigle, a SoCal startup that has an aggressive global mission to bring entrepreneurs together from around the world. We followed up with Luc to see just how he’s been managing the entrepreneurial waters. The quintessential problem that every startup has is one of visibility.

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SoCal Southern California Startup Platform 104

SoCal CTO

NOVEMBER 10, 2009

From there, I became the first non-founder employee at an e-commerce startup called BITSource, which was the first electronic software distributor delivering electronic volume software licenses to corporations. Earlier this year I founded a new startup called KlickFu. What’s keeping you up at night? What are you working on now?

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Product Entrepreneur Social Media Google 150

socalTECH

FEBRUARY 17, 2017

We caught up with Ryan (who calls himself an "anti-VC") to hear more about his investment firm, which has invested in such companies as Heal , Elite Daily , Saucey , and FragMob. Tell us a bit of the story on how you started HashtagOne? We want to have startups we can get productive or generating revenue pretty quickly.

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Venture Capital Entrepreneur Technical Review Software Review 100

SoCal CTO

JULY 23, 2012

I received a great question via LinkedIn: I'm the founding engineer and working hard to launch my startup. I seem to encounter a lot of people who want to attach a CTO label to me as I'm the only programmer on the founding team of three. What can I do to best equip myself to step up when the need to officially fill this role arises?

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CTO Coach CTO Hire Outsource Development Develop 231

socalTECH

JANUARY 19, 2017

To help fix that, the startup has created a mobile app to guide people through their strengths, interests, key skills, and more to guide them along the way to a career they'll love. How did this start? Deborah Ramo: The group of us who started the company are all very interested in solving problems. Look for ways to move up?

Help 100

Help Education CTO Coach Startup 100

Tech Zulu Event

MAY 20, 2014

TechZulu recently sat down with east coast transplant Olenka Polak to talk about startup life in Los Angeles. Explain to our readers why you started your company, and why you created your app myLINGO. ’ OP: Of course we had to do a lot of research to figure out if this was a viable solution. Entertainment.

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Startup Entertainment CTO Coach Screening 91

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 23, 2012

One of the first tough decisions that startup founders have to make is how to allocate or split the equity among co-founders. The easy answer of splitting it equally among all co-founders, since there is minimal value at that point, is usually the worst possible answer, and often results in a later startup failure due to an obvious inequity.

Startup 101

Startup Entrepreneur Equity CTO Hire 101

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

One of the first tough decisions that startup founders have to make is how to allocate or split the equity among co-founders. The easy answer of splitting it equally among all co-founders, since there is minimal value at that point, is usually the worst possible answer, and often results in a later startup failure due to an obvious inequity.

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Equity Startup CTO Hire CTO Coach 91

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

Some great content around the intersection of startups and being a Startup CTO in June this year. This continues my series of posts: Top 30 Startup Posts in June 2010 Top 29 Startup Posts May 2010 Startup CTO Top 30 Posts for April 16 Great Startup Posts from March The following are the top items based on social signals.

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Startup Venture Capital Blogging Software Review 217